


Fortitude

by shinsein4



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, PTSD mentions, Soulmate AU, lotsa angst babey, mentions of ellie/dina - Freeform, mentions of owen/abby, no one was gonna write it for me rip, we will be RESPECTING dina in this house, will definitely have a happy ending, will have lots of smut and fluff eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:08:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26337727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinsein4/pseuds/shinsein4
Summary: Abby stood frozen and her eyes were fixed onto Ellie’s wrist. Ellie looked down at the mark on her arm. It twined over the tattoo she’d attempted to blend with it. It curled around her burn scar, cradling the raised skin in a foreboding hold. Cold, white-hot dread pooled within her. Lines that had once been mostly covered by a tattoo had bloomed, bright and stark against the salty air. Ellie lifted her face to look at Abby.Where the shirt had ridden up Abby's skin, an intricate design crawled up her abdomen. It echoed the same twisting lines that snaked along Ellie’s inner wrist and spiraled around her arm. Ellie had the odd feeling of weightlessness that made the nausea at the back of her throat curdle.
Relationships: Abby/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 173





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't stop thinking about this AU. 4:30 AM and here we are. :) 
> 
> Chapters will be longer than this in the future.

Fingers covered in grime wiped away strands of sweaty hair from a drenched forehead. Ellie scanned the distance facing her. The jagged peaks of a town to the far east of Santa Barbara were raised shadows against the sky. A bent over and faded sign deemed the small town Apple Valley. As Ellie had passed it, she’d wondered how people from the old world named things. Now, as the sun set and darkness creeped up the broken stones, Ellie thought the town would be better called Shithole Valley. 

She was positive it’d been around three months since she’d let Abby live. As she had held Abby beneath the water, she had seen Joel’s face in her memory. She had watched him turn towards her, a warmness glittering in his eyes as he strummed the strings of his guitar. It was a flash of images, a brief recall to a memory of hope. 

Joel didn’t want this. 

Her grip slackened around Abby and she released the woman. Abby surfaced in an explosion of retches and coughs echoed by Ellie’s broken noises. She told the woman to go, the same woman who had asked her to save the life of the boy in the boat. She had watched Abby hoist him up, standing strong against her own weakness to bring him to safety. She’d waited -turned back!- to make sure Ellie would also escape.

Joel _wouldn’t_ have wanted this.

Grief surged through Ellie’s body and another ragged sob ripped itself from her chest. Bitterness bubbled like acid in her stomach. But this wouldn’t bring him back. _It wouldn’t bring him back._ When she still made out Abby’s figure in the corner of her vision, she turned to snarl at the woman. To tell her not to make her say it again.

Instead, Abby stood frozen and her eyes were fixed onto Ellie’s wrist. Ellie looked down at the mark on her arm. It twined over the tattoo she’d attempted to blend with it. It curled around her burn scar, cradling the raised skin in a foreboding hold. Cold, white-hot dread pooled within her. Lines that had once been mostly covered by a tattoo had bloomed, bright and stark against the salty air. Ellie lifted her face to look at Abby.

Where the shirt had ridden up Abby's skin, an intricate design crawled up her abdomen. It echoed the same twisting lines that snaked along Ellie’s inner wrist and spiraled around her arm. Ellie had the odd feeling of weightlessness that made the nausea at the back of her throat curdle. There was no fucking way this was happening.

Her chest burned and twisted with the knowledge of it, the helplessness of it. She wondered if someone out there was laughing at her. Ellie’s eyes darted upward to meet Abby’s. She couldn’t read her face and she didn’t stick around to find out what reaction Abby would have. Ellie pushed herself out of the water, her palms slipping in the sharp sand and sending her splashing back into the water. She noisily forced her body away from Abby. She did not look back. She ran as far as she could.

Three months hadn’t been enough time to come to terms with the fact that she was Abby’s fucking soulmate. She wasn’t sure anything could ever make that particular new life flaw any less of a twisted joke. It had completely destroyed any chance she could ever have had with Dina, with their son. But that wasn’t true, was it? She’d never been meant to be with Dina to begin with.

The thought made her chest churn with pain on the darkest and quietest nights. Ellie wasn’t sure what luck was worse: the fact that a kind enough person, an older man, from the prisoner’s she’d released had ensured her wounds didn’t kill her or that her soulmate was Abby to begin with. The old man had asked once what had happened to the woman and boy who had been at the pillars. When he’d seen the face Ellie had made, he smartly avoided ever voicing that question again.

Ellie didn’t stay with him long. She’d thanked him and left as soon as she could push herself to her feet. She didn’t know where she was heading. She had no plan. She only had the haunting knowledge of something she would never be able to scratch out of her brain. She’d lost not only Dina but any opportunity for love. How could anyone love the person who had murdered their loved ones? 

_How could anyone love someone who murdered their boyfriend? Or their pregnant friend. Or every single one of their damn friends, really._

Ellie hadn’t stopped. She’d kept going. Abby had destroyed one life. Ellie had destroyed not only countless more than that, but also her own. Who was the real monster?

Though she had run from Abby, she couldn’t bring herself to leave California. She wandered along and near the border but always turned back. It ate at Ellie that she couldn’t leave. It made her angry and reckless. She felt like a pacing animal, waiting for the inevitable. She didn’t know what the inevitable would be and she didn’t know if that was worse than knowing.

When she dreamed at night, she tossed and turned with the flashing images of spilled blood and crushed skulls. Some nights, though, the dreams would fade and in their wake feelings of warmth hesitantly invaded her senses only to evaporate violently as her eyes blinked open.

Ellie couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt rested. Dark circles weighed down her eyes and though she ate more, her appetite remained nonexistent. Every bite of food tasted like dirt. Her days were beginning to grow monotonous as she trailed up and down the Californian boarder like an agitated tiger in its cage.  
She ignored the bad feeling welling in her gut, a feeling of caution. She pushed into the darkening buildings of Apple Valley. She made her way to the shape of a motel sign barely hanging onto the pole it was affixed to. Rubble blocked the actual building, the ramshackle roof just barely over the piles of fencing and debris. Ellie’s eyes felt heavy as she made her way to the lowest of the edges crowding around the building. Her hands reached firmly along the top of a fence edge and she hoisted herself over it. 

The tearing sound of her shirt prickled at her ears, the fabric wrapping firmly around a notch of broken links. It tugged her off balance and Ellie’s heart jumped into her throat. She fell loudly to the pavement below her and she heard the crack of her leg before she felt it. She tried to stifle the shriek that attempted to force itself from out of her gurgling throat. In the lot of the motel it sounded like thunder.

Ellie wondered if she’d start to see her life flash before her eyes when the guttural clicks of an infected sounded from inside the building. A laugh trembled within her chest. The universe really did have a sense of humor. At least she wouldn’t turn into one of them. She watched the Clicker’s stuttering movement of steps. It trotted towards her on bent legs. Behind it, she spotted a couple of Stalkers peeping out. 

Ellie didn’t know what made her try to fight back. Next time a sound really did tumble from her lips when the weight she pressed upon her broken leg shot pain right up her body. She lashed out with an arm and the knife she held plunged into the Clicker’s head. Ellie’s pained sob lingered with its dying clicks as she tumbled to the ground with it. Her head collided with the debris of a broken chunk of pavement. Ellie stumbled back on her hands clumsily, dizziness flooding her senses.

Alright, this was definitely it. Maybe in the end she really had been intended for nothing. Her eyes were fluttering and she could feel something hot seeping down and licking at her eyebrows. 

_I really fucked up, huh, Joel? Ellie huffed at her thoughts._

She didn’t know where she flinched or fell over when the boom of gunfire assaulted her eardrums. She tried to force her eyes open and they lazily focused on the source of the noise. A boy wielded a bow and knocked arrows to fire them straight through the eye sockets of approaching infected. It was familiar to Ellie and she wracked her slow brain to remember. Another figure entered Ellie’s vision from the boy’s left. This figure shot gunfire into the crowd and the emerging creatures fell to the ground. 

Someone shouted something and Ellie’s fading senses recognized the tones of arguing. It ended as quickly as it had begun and she wondered vaguely in a corner of her mind if she had imagined it. A stark clarity bled into her sight as a face settled into her line of sight. She recognized the features immediately. 

The woman approached Ellie slowly and the last thing Ellie’s eyes took in was Abby’s face.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man. I did NOT expect the response this has gotten. Hahhaa, I'm SO glad there are other people who think this is just as spicy as I do. If anyone notices any discrepancies with time passage, just let me know. It's hard to keep track of that. Also I do not know a god damn thing about broken legs. :) we goin in blind babey
> 
> Thank you SO much guys. Enjoy! <3

Abby’s mood had been sour from the very moment she’d rolled out of bed. That bed was a moth eaten mattress in the cleanest room Lev and her could find. She’d been irritable and brooding for most of the past couple weeks. Her impatience with everything lurched like frigid waves beneath the surface of every other emotion. Lev watched her with concerned eyes and she hated herself for making him worry.

She really couldn’t catch a break. Abby couldn’t get the image of Ellie curled over in the swell of waves, her mark in plain sight, out of her mind. To see your soulmate’s mark was meant to be intimate. It was the promise of something ungiven in every partnership had with a person who did not share your mark. Abby had never known much intimacy with anyone. Instead, the one moment that should’ve been intimate was ruined by her soulmate being the same scrawny girl who she tried her hardest to forget.

She hadn’t been able to keep the truth from Lev. He’d read her like a book as soon as he’d been lucid enough to take one glance at her distraught face. She’d told him in quiet, tight words and he responded in ways she didn’t think he would. He was convinced she should turn back. She vehemently refused each and every time. Lev had been relentless. _She’s your soulmate. You can’t run from that, Abby._ She could hear his words in her head every night when she’d keep watch, alone around the embers of a fire they always had to put out too early.

She’d remained fixed upon finding Fireflies. She tried to ignore Lev’s looks of worry and disapproval the further she pushed herself away from what he felt she should do. But when they’d managed to find the island, it was deserted. She found no leads to where the Fireflies had gone. She had been baffled and hot disappointment burned in her chest. The frustrated tears that she’d cried still seemed burned into her cheeks. Two months. The Rattlers had imprisoned her for two months. That was more than enough time for the Fireflies to have jumped ship. There were no leads to be found anywhere they’d looked thereafter.

The bitterness of it was surreal. She’d come so far to rejoin the Fireflies. Owen had actually been right and she’d _made contact._ It was naive to expect them to have waited for her. Everyone dies out here. She had likely been just another casualty to them. 

That was over a week ago and Abby had finally given up on ever finding them again. It was a sharp and heavy blow, one that she struggled to accept. Among _other_ things she couldn’t also accept. When she’d told Lev that they should stop looking, he’d been understanding. He’d smiled at her and suggested they just travel, see what was out there. Her heart clenched at his attempts to drive her forward. But his attempts to sway her toward finding Ellie remained thwarted by her anger and denial. She’d put her foot down and informed him that they were leaving this state. That they would not be tracking Ellie, regardless of the stain of a mark that plagued both of their bodies. It had been Ellie who’d ran.

So, Lev trailed behind her and she dreaded his silence because it always meant he was thinking heavily. She desperately hoped he wouldn’t throw another barrage of pros at her. Lev had always been the one to see the light in the dark and she truly could not relate. The last time Abby had any light in the dark, it’d been snuffed out each and every time. 

Their travels had brought them to a small town west. At one point, it might have been charming. They’d cleared out a building, a small cottage nestled at the rear of the town. It would make a decent enough camp for a couple nights and Abby was eager to get back to it after a day of scavenging for supplies. She’d even found a Massachusetts state quarter in a pharmacy. It was probably the only highlight of her day, frankly, the coin one she hadn’t yet added to her new collection. When Lev had asked her about it, she’d grinned toothily at him following by telling him a fact about the state. Lev always seemed to find it fascinating that she knew a fact about every state a coin originated from. 

Abby’s thoughts were interrupted by the lack of Lev’s footsteps following behind her. When she turned to glance at him, the boy in question had his eyes trained on the very end of the street. 

“Abby, do you hear that?”

Abby tensed and strained her ears to catch what Lev was asking about. She felt adrenaline beginning to prepare to pump through her veins. In the three months since she’d been emaciated and weak, her muscle tone had begun to fill out again. She was ready to handle anything thrown at them. She’d protect Lev this time. 

The sounds of the infected drifted down the street to her ears. It was slight at first, just a whisper of noise that she was uncertain she was hearing. What she definitely heard was the very human sound of pain that followed. Her head snapped in the direction of a mountain of debris at the end of the street where Lev’s attention had been diverted. Her teeth ground together in anxiety, a choice weighing in her mind. A choice that was made for her when Lev took off in that direction.

“Lev!” Abby called to him as quietly as she could. “Wait!”

“We have to try to help!” 

Sometimes Abby wondered if his selflessness would get him killed one day. It tightened in an unnerved coil within her mind some nights. But she followed him, unholstering the rifle she’d picked off of a Rattler. She begged that this wouldn’t get ugly and that whoever was in trouble hadn’t been bit. She shadowed Lev closely and as they approached the debris, she caught sight of a woman fallen in a heap on the other side of a chain link fence.

Her heart leapt into her throat when it grew clear that the woman had broken her leg. She lurched forward to sink a knife into the Clicker that bore down on her. Abby couldn’t tell if she’d been bit in the tumble with it but was slightly impressed that the woman had even managed to put any weight on her disfigured leg. Lev hauled himself over the rubble and she quickly followed. He loosed arrows into the approaching infected and she moved to provide cover fire in the seconds that followed.

Abby threw a glance over her shoulder at the woman behind them. The whiplash that pooled hotly in her neck went ignored as she doubletook. 

“You.” Abby gasped for the second time in her life to this woman.

When Lev looked for himself, his gaze shot back and forth between the women. Worry furrowed his brow seconds before determination filled his stare in a way Abby knew she was about to be helpless to.

“We have to help her. We need to bring her to safety.” Lev’s voice was steady and Abby’s hands trembled in a way she resented.

“She tried to kill you!” Abby’s anger flared and it was lost upon her that it hadn’t mattered that Ellie tried to kill _her_ too. 

“She let us go,” he argued, “you can’t let her die, Abby. You can’t just pretend this isn’t reality. She’s your soulmate and you _can’t_ just leave her here.”

The wet shwip of Lev’s arrow sinking into the last infected was loud between them after those words. Ellie was clearly out of it, her eyes lazily unfocused in the gleam of her flashlight. Blood reflected in the darkness, seeping down Ellie’s forehead in a slow crawl. Abby needed to make her decision now.

For the longest time, Abby wondered if she was a monster. In her worst nightmares, it wasn’t her own screams she heard. They were Ellie’s. As she’d walk into the scene of her father’s death, it had stopped being her own wails that followed. Abby was haunted by her actions in the ways only someone who’d reaped the consequences could be. 

“Maybe this is how the cycle was meant to end.” Lev insisted.

The words singed Abby’s brain and she felt them tingle on her skin, unpleasant and unsettling. She knew what he was referring to the second he’d said it. But the decision had been made.

She approached Ellie, picking up the woman’s backpack and throwing it over her shoulder. When she crouched before Ellie, their eyes met for a brief moment before Ellie’s rolled back into her head. If she was going to survive, they needed to get her to the cottage they’d cleared. If someone had ever told her that she’d be scooping up this woman to carry her to safety, she’d have broken their nose. Ellie was small against her chest and the contact made Abby distinctly unnerved. Despite her discomfort, she attempted to hold Ellie carefully.

She refused to meet Lev’s eyes as he followed her quickly out from the maze of debris crowded around the parking lot. The fact that she could hear no other infected reassured her. Her worry for Lev’s safety lessened in that moment, relief that they’d likely make it without a hitch. Abby wondered if it was lucky or unlucky that Ellie had been close to their chosen building. Their steps took them down the broken sidestreet of a neighborhood that led them to the small house. Lev scouted ahead a bit, ensuring that the area was still clear.

He hovered close as Abby pushed into their building, carefully avoiding the overgrown foliage of the property. Her mind was like a tunnel. She tried not to overthink her current situation. She wasn’t certain if she’d go insane or not if she thought too hard on it. Maybe she already was insane. Instead, she placed Ellie onto a large coffee table that Lev cleared off to the best of his ability. Abby had decent medical training having a doctor for a father. 

Inspecting Ellie, it was clear that the woman was malnourished. Bllood sharply contrasted against the pale gauntness of her features. At the very least, Ellie’s head wound was unsevere. The same could not be said for her leg. She handed a rag for Lev to place into Ellie’s mouth.

“Make sure that’s firmly between her teeth. It’ll prevent her from biting off her tongue.”

Lev followed her orders, the same determination giving his features a stern edge. She was grateful for him in this moment, no matter who it was they were helping. Abby glanced around the room and when her eyes spotted an old, rickety chair, she ventured toward it. The legs gave way with her kick and she picked the sturdiest one out of the bunch. When she returned to Ellie, she gave a look to Lev that she knew he understood as get ready. 

With firm hands placed on Ellie’s right shin, Abby swiftly reset the limb against the length of the chair leg and quickly fastened it to the wood. Lev did good on his part, holding Ellie firmly as she jerked, a muffled sound of pain pushing out around the rag between her teeth. Abby was relieved that Ellie didn’t awaken. She wasn’t eager to interact with her. She was wracking her brain now with any possibility that she wouldn’t have to at all.

It was with tired resignment that she pushed up from the coffee table and exited the living room. The other woman would be fine enough for now. The kitchen was a decent size and cordoned off by a long island counter. Abby settled her face into her hands, elbows resting heavily on the dusty surface of it. Right. Okay. So she just did that. She saved the life of her enemy. Soulmate. Enemy who was her soulmate. 

_But is she really your enemy anymore at this point? You didn’t work so hard to move on to just to devolve back into-_

A frustrated sigh blew out from between Abby’s lips, ruffling the hair hanging in her eyes. Ellie wasn’t anything anymore. Except apparently her soulmate. Right. Fantastic.

“You did the right thing.”

Lev’s voice was a shock to her system and Abby hated that she jumped. She twisted her body around to lean back against the counter. His face was worried but proud and Abby wanted to look away. She didn’t deserve that pride. But Lev was Lev and he would always reassure her.

“Abby, maybe sometimes things are meant to happen for a reason and we don’t realize that’s okay until we give them a chance.” He sounded thoughtful and Abby was taken again with how wise he was, how this child could manage to find words she’d heard no one else try to say.

She didn’t know what would happen from here. She wasn’t completely sure if she _wanted_ to know. Her eyes drifted to Ellie’s form resting atop the coffee table. Wasn’t it enough living in a world of constant danger? She just _had_ to be tied to _her_ as well?

“Maybe, kid.”


End file.
